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The Download: the desert data center boom, and how to measure Earth's elevations

MIT Technology Review

In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park. The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert--and it's just far enough away from Nevada's communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future--our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution.


Chicago paper publishes AI-generated 'summer reading list' with books that don't exist

FOX News

Texas high school student Elliston Berry joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the House's passage of a new bill that criminalizes the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, including content created with artificial intelligence. The Chicago Sun-Times admitted on Tuesday that it published an AI-generated list of books that don't exist for its summer reading list. On Sunday, the publication released a special 64-page section titled "Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer" which featured a list of 15 recommended books for summer. However, upon further look, it was found that 10 of the 15 books on the list were not real. One example included a book called "Nightshade Market" by Min Jin Lee, which was described as a "riveting tale set in Seoul's underground economy" and follows "three women whose paths intersect in an illegal night market" exploring "class, gender and the shadow economies beneath prosperous societies."


Boost your workflow for life with this 60 AI assistant

Popular Science

How often do you wish you had an assistant at work? Let Swatle be your AI-powered partner, helping you tackle your projects efficiently. And luckily, a premium lifetime subscription can be yours now for just 59.99 (reg. Think of Swatle as your right-hand tool, serving as an AI-powered productivity partner ready to help you manage projects, automate repetitive tasks, and even organize your whole team's workflow. Thanks to Swatle's artificial intelligence, it even adapts to your individual needs as you go.


The Dyson Supersonic Nural hair dryer is finally on sale at Amazon -- get it for its lowest-ever price

Mashable

SAVE OVER 100: As of May 22, the Dyson Supersonic Nural hair dryer is on sale for 399 at Amazon. Dyson has a dedicated bunch of fans out there, so when they release a limited edition jasper plum colorway, it causes a big stir. So what do these fans do when presented with the opportunity to get their hands on this stylish new color? They wait for that first deal to drop. As of May 22, the Dyson Supersonic Nural hair dryer is on sale for 399 at Amazon.


ColdGANs: Taming Language GANs with Cautious Sampling Strategies Thomas Scialom, Paul-Alexis Dray

Neural Information Processing Systems

Training regimes based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) suffer from known limitations, often leading to poorly generated text sequences. At the root of these limitations is the mismatch between training and inference, i.e. the so-called exposure bias, exacerbated by considering only the reference texts as correct, while in practice several alternative formulations could be as good. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can mitigate those limitations but the discrete nature of text has hindered their application to language generation: the approaches proposed so far, based on Reinforcement Learning, have been shown to underperform MLE. Departing from previous works, we analyze the exploration step in GANs applied to text generation, and show how classical sampling results in unstable training. We propose to consider alternative exploration strategies in a GAN framework that we name ColdGANs, where we force the sampling to be close to the distribution modes to get smoother learning dynamics. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the proposed language GANs compare favorably to MLE, and obtain improvements over the state-of-the-art on three generative tasks, namely unconditional text generation, question generation, and abstractive summarization.


Who's to Blame When AI Agents Screw Up?

WIRED

Over the past year, veteran software engineer Jay Prakash Thakur has spent his nights and weekends prototyping AI agents that could, in the near future, order meals and engineer mobile apps almost entirely on their own. His agents, while surprisingly capable, have also exposed new legal questions that await companies trying to capitalize on Silicon Valley's hottest new technology. Agents are AI programs that can act mostly independently, allowing companies to automate tasks such as answering customer questions or paying invoices. While ChatGPT and similar chatbots can draft emails or analyze bills upon request, Microsoft and other tech giants expect that agents will tackle more complex functions--and most importantly, do it with little human oversight. The tech industry's most ambitious plans involve multi-agent systems, with dozens of agents someday teaming up to replace entire workforces.


Interview with Gillian Hadfield: Normative infrastructure for AI alignment

AIHub

During the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), held in Jeju, I had the opportunity to meet with one of the keynote speakers, Gillian Hadfield. We spoke about her interdisciplinary research, career trajectory, path into AI alignment, law, and general thoughts on AI systems. Transcript: Note: the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. This is an interview with Professor Gillian Hadfield who was a keynote speaker at IJCAI 2024. She gave a very insightful talk about normative infrastructures and how they can guide our search for AI alignment. Kumar Kshitij Patel (KKP): Could you talk a bit about your background and career trajectory? I want our readers to understand how much interdisciplinary work you've done over the years. Gillian Hadfield (GH): I did a PhD in economics and a law degree, a JD, at Stanford, originally motivated by wanting to think about the big questions about the world. So I read John Rawls' theory of justice when I was an undergraduate, and those are the big questions: how do we organize the world and just institutions, but I was very interested in using more formal methods and social scientific approaches. That's why I decided to do that joint degree. So, this is in the 1980s, and in the early days of starting to use a lot of game theory. I studied information theory, a student of Canaro and Paul Milgram at the economics department at Stanford. I did work on contract theory, bargaining theory, but I was still very interested in going to law school, not to practice law, but to learn about legal institutions and how those work. I was a member of this emerging area of law and economics early in my career, which of course, was interdisciplinary, using economics to think about law and legal institutions.


Wheeled, rugged robot dog built for extreme industrial missions

FOX News

The machine is designed to inspect industrial sites, respond to disasters, carry out logistics operations and support scientific research. Deep Robotics, a company from China, has unveiled a durable four-legged robot built to operate in extreme environments that humans struggle to traverse. It's called the Lynx M20, and it builds upon the agility of its predecessor, the Lynx robot dog. This versatile machine is designed to handle anything from inspecting industrial sites and responding to disasters to carrying out logistics operations and supporting scientific research. Here's what you need to know.


AI Melania: First lady embarks on 'new frontier' in publishing with audiobook of memoir

FOX News

EXCLUSIVE: First lady Melania Trump is launching an audiobook of her memoir using artificial intelligence (AI) audio technology in multiple languages, Fox News Digital has learned. The first lady released her first memoir, "Melania," last year. This week, she is breaking new ground by releasing "Melania, the Audiobook," which has been "created entirely" with AI. "I am proud to be at the forefront of publishing's new frontier โ€“ the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and audio," Trump told Fox News Digital. The first lady said ElevenLabs AI developed "an AI-generated replica of my voice under strict supervision, which will establish an unforgettable connection with my personal story, in multiple languages for listeners worldwide." ElevenLabs AI CEO Mati Staniszewski told Fox News Digital that they are "excited that Melania Trump trusted our technology to power this first-of-its-kind audiobook project."


My Friend's Life's Work Is Being Slashed Into Oblivion. It Hurts to Watch.

Slate

Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? One of my dearest friends was recently squeezed into an unwanted early retirement by DOGE. The work she was doing at the government agency where she's spent most of her career is on the verge of being eliminated or slashed into oblivion, and it kills me to know that her life's work is about to be reversed. I want to support her through this.